(Not) Too Small To Fail

When I was in the 5th grade our teacher asked that you raise your hand if you thought you were more mature now when compared to 1st grade...I was the only one to not raise my hand (At that time a young DK equated maturity to conformity). In 6th grade I had my first smoke. In 7th grade I drank two Busch beers on Halloween. And eventually...finally...made out with a girl when I got to HS (I was drunk and actually was blacked out during the start of it...then I un-blacked out to kissing a girl and I remember thinking 'cool, I'm finally making out with someone!'...later during the mess of this session  I asked her if she wanted a hickey....she declined...we never did make out again) Yep, I've had some pretty bad ass moments in my life.

This story is the not one of those moments. This story, like many of my life, is the exact opposite of bad ass. What is the opposite of bad ass? I don't know - maybe good penis for boys and good vagina for girls?....hmm, I may be taking a way too literal approach here. We can figure this out later. For now, we should focus more on this disaster of a story.

(side note - I seem to be in a mood for bold and italic print. I think I'll stop this now.)

The year is 81...The Phillies failed to repeat as champions during a strike shortened MLB season, Russians were Americans' excessive fear of choice, and the iconic commercial catch phrase "Where's the Beef?" was still 3 years away.

No way these ladies are still alive. RIP, funny women from the greatest commercial of all time!

I was an eight year old on my way to the church hall with my dad and my younger brother, age 6, to go through the haunted house that the high school kids put on every year. This is a very low budget affair as it was run by the local catholic school with a limit budget. The people playing parts of the ghosts, ghouls, vampires, etc were all between of the ages 14-18.

Because of this fact, the parents would wait outside as their kids went in...kind of a rite of passage of some sorts...so my dad did the same thing.

For approximately 99% of the grade school kids that walked through the 4 rooms that made up this haunted house, this was a 90 to 120 second affair with the occasional "oh man!" moment before you got a handful of candy at the end.  99% of the kids walked through without experience any sort of real terror. 99% of the kids actually found the production of the haunted house sorely lacking of anything scary.

Of that 99% was my younger brother....in that other, 1% category  - me, of course.

My terrifying ordeal pretty much started right off from the bat. My younger brother and I enter in to the first room - there is a strobe light and dry ice....the first ghoul jumps from behind a curtain, right in front us.

and I lose it...how I reacted it best summed up by the following equation:

in '02 he probably made a similar face
when Mila Kunis actually agreed to go
out with him. I still can't get over that.

X 10,000 = My reaction







My brother, on the other hand, is as calm as can be.

By the time we make our way to the 2nd room I'm already a mess. Tears are streaming down my face and all I want is to be out of this hell. Decibel levels of my screams are reaching new levels and in doing so I'm basically alerting all the other monsters that there is a terrified kid and they should all come quick because they'll actually get to truly scare someone. So they come..each one scaring me more than the last. I'm fairly sure that I am one of the few 10 yr olds who emotionally felt what Jodie Foster's character must have felt during the bar scene of The Accused....And that premise is completely ridiculous because what my eyes saw was equivalent to the the following:

not that scary

even less scary

just plain funny

But what my extremely overactive imagination was seeing was:

Good bye all! Bury me with all my toys so
no one else can play with them!

As you can tell at this point I'm pretty sure that I'm not long for this word and I start to think about stuff that I'm going to really miss.

trick or treating and all the candy it brings.

the only thing better than candy is more candy!

Cartoons




Why have you forsaken me Super Friends, Grape Ape,
and Captain Caveman?? Scooby and Shaggy, get the gang
and the Mystery Van and come save me!!

  and the women's underwear section of the Sears catalogue

sadly no Victoria's Secret catalogue in our home

All hell is breaking lose and I'm pretty much running for my dear life at this point. I'm not sure if there is a world record is for the longest constant high pitched terror scream held by a child under 10 but if there is I definitely was flirting with it that night, much to the delight of the HS kids who were throwing the haunted house...and much to the supreme annoyance of my dad who had to listen to this mess while waiting outside.

The ghosts and ghouls kept coming after me...I was basically a Pacman in desperate need of a power pellet.

Dear God, if you get me out of here I promise at my next confession I'll
give you the proper count for the number of times I took the Lord's name in vain.

And just when all hope seemed lost and I began to wonder what Heaven would be like, I got my power pellet. From an unknowing elderly couple. I assume there were walking through because their grandchild, or great grandchild, or great great grandchild (just to help you visualize how old they really be) were working the haunted house. I grabbed on to that old man's leg with such reckless abandon and squeezed so hard that if he had any heart issues I could of triggered an unfortunate "episode" of some sorts.

Still my younger brothers seems unfazed by both the horror that is engulfing us as well as the pathetic display of cowardice his older brother is showing.

So the man begins to walk with me attached to his leg because he now understands that I'm not letting go until we're either both dead or we're somehow miraculously saved.

We're kind of like these monkeys:

Except for the monkey is much younger than I am, the baby monkey's relationship to the older one is probably appropriate for such kind of clinging, and baby monkey is completely acting it's age.

The next few minutes include the old man struggling to walk with the new added weight to the lower half of one side while trying to keep his wife's hand. She has a cane and the steps do not come easy to her.

Finally a ray of hope, as I see the door...an EXIT! We're gonna make it. We are so close to it! Let's go old man! Leave the woman...she's dead weight and probably costing you a fortune in medical bills and I'm sure Medicare isn't covering everything...and it's the 80s...Reagan is probably going to get rid of it anyways. Let's go and I promise to listen to any long stories about how life was so much better back when you were young!

Sadly the man does not leave his wife behind so our trek to the exit is slow, but I still feel that I may indeed survive this ordeal (sans any dignity of course.)
Finally we get to the final small hallway...two more steps and I'm home free!

But of course it's never that easy. Not in horror movies and not now. A man, about as scary as Grandpa Munster is handing out candy as you exit and I let out one last scream while I increase the grip I have upon this poor old man's leg. One would hope the constant pressure I was putting on this man's leg didn't cause any blood clots that led to his death and the subsequent ending of his 62 yr marriage to his darling wife, but one has no way of knowing these things for sure.

ah, kid - in 3 years I would recommend you
skip watching Poltergeist..(I would not
heed this advice)

I refuse his probably poisoned candy...my younger brother does not. He receives his candy in the same calm demeanour he showed before going in and while walking through.

We exit to the cool evening and I begin what would be my first official walk of shame.